Posts Tagged ‘bloated

It’s 1980 and time to be old. This record looks like they were feeling old, or else being pressured to pay their coke bill. There are enough good songs from their 2nd and 3rd album to make a single greatest hits record, sure, but the problem is trying to come up with songs from the rest of them. Though, actually, “Dream On,” which starts this collection, sounds better to me now than it ever did. “Last Child,” from Rocks, which I’ve never heard before, sounds okay. “Back In The Saddle,” however, is something I’m afraid I HAVE heard before but had stored in some dark recess of my mind where things like images of repair guys’ butt cracks and squashed animals, and backed up public toilet smells, and TV shows from my childhood go, hopefully never to be dredged up.

Even as late as the late 1970s, I guess popular musicians weren’t able to escape the Lennon/McCartney cover curse, as in EVERYONE had to do one, and they are usually the most unlistenable songs on the record. “Come Together” isn’t horrible, it’s pretty much exactly like The Beatles version but about ten percent less fresh. That they included “Kings and Queens” on this record completely baffles me, but hey, a few days ago I’d NEVER heard it, and now I’ve listened to it several times, so I guess the jokes on me! “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” could pretty much mark the beginning of the Eighties, lamest decade of all time, or the End of Rock’n’roll, or the end of Aerosmith, or the end of all humanity, or it could just be a series of bad decisions (writing it, learning it, playing it, recording it, putting it on a record, putting it on THIS record).

The best two songs, “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way” happen to be from Aerosmith’s best record, Toys in the Attic. This is why I love the internet; listening to “Walk This Way” compelled me to search for “cowbells in music” and I pretty much spent a couple of hours then reading crazy people writing about how great the cowbell is, including in this song. Of course, I agree– and I’ve always thought that little cowbell bit was what made a good song a great song. Boy, they really knew how to not overdo it, on this song, as excessive as it is in many ways.

You always have to wonder what it would be like to do some kind of art, like say playing rock music, and suddenly find yourself a commodity. To have some completely soulless money counters putting out a “greatest hits” of your work. I mean, I can’t imagine how weird it must feel! This record kind of documents, for me, the problem of the whole endeavor. Listen to side one, then side two—it’s an amazing illustration of what LEAN sounds like, and what BLOATED sounds like, side by side.